Le travail de classification de l’OuBaPo, ou la mise en normes de l’excentricité

Abstract

The OuBaPo, officially created in 1992, included in its very first work (OuPus 1) a classification and definition of its devices in a strict, yet evolutive, list of constraints (like its elder, the OuLiPo). In the OuPus, Thierry Groensteen defines a taxonomy in two main branches, generative and transformative constraints, which has generated two simultaneous movements within the Ouvroir: experimenting with existing constraints to produce new works or inventing new constraints that can be classified in turn; more rarely, including in the OuBaPo library works that are not part of the group, either because their authors are not members (Marc-Antoine Mathieu) or because the works were produced before 1992 (Gustave Verbeek).

One can thus consider the OuBaPo as a means to classify and formalize a number of constraints that may be considered eccentric, be they formal, narrative or aesthetic. As a consequence, works that distance themselves from more conventional stories and forms cannot be conceptualized outside of a canon flexible enough to include them, but which de facto rejects other experimentations, such as infranarrative comics. Besides, through its endeavor the OuBapo presents a historical selection of what can be considered atypical in comics, concealing several non-OuBaPian eccentricities and arbitrarily integrating others.